Richards argues that beauty standards are generally acceptable while Dworkin argues they are problematic. Richards addresses claims against beauty and finds them lacking, concluding beauty is important. Dworkin examines footbinding, arguing it teaches women submission through pain, and analogizes current standards to footbinding, saying they define women's relationships to their bodies and are based on problematic gender relations of romantic love. Dworkin's solution is redefining the relationship between women and their bodies.

1. Beauty Standards
Richards and Dworkin

2. Overview
• Different Feminisms
– Liberal vs Radical
• Argument for Beauty Standards in General
– Beauty is a Good
• Argument Against Beauty Standards as They
Exist
– Critique of Romantic Love

3. Feminisms
Liberal Feminism (Richards)
Liberation of Individual Women
Radical Feminism (Dworkin)
Liberation of the Group: Woman

4. Richards
• Goal: Try to figure out why someone might
take beauty to be a problem
• Method: Explore different colloquial claims
• Conclusion: Beauty practices are, in
general, perfectly acceptable

5. Richards
• Claim: If you do not “adorn” yourself, then
you will not be loved just for your beauty.
[Men “only want one thing” argument.]
• Response: Eliminating it will also get rid of
good men.

6. Richards
• Claim: Enjoyment of sex is a bad, negative
thing.
• Response: This is personal preference, not a
serious feminist ideal.

7. Richards
• Claim: Beauty is not important.
• Response: We recognize beauty as important
in other areas (art, nature), so it makes no
sense to reject it in the area of people.

8. Richards
• Claim: Valuing beauty discriminates against
ugly women.
• Response: Beauty is like natural talent: the
distribution may be unjust and we may want
to correct it, but the solution is not to pretend
it is not important.

9. Richards
• Claim: All people are naturally equally
beautiful.
• Response: This is simply false. Arguing
otherwise would entail arguing that beauty is
not important (see previous points).

10. Does Richards successfully prove her
conclusion:
Beauty practices are, in
general, perfectly acceptable?

11. Dworkin
• Goal: Show that current beauty standards are highly
problematic and explain why.
• Method: Examine egregious example of beauty
standards (footbinding) and figure out why it is wrong.
Show that current beauty standards are wrong in the
same way [Argument from Analogy]
• Conclusion: Current beauty standards are wrong
because they are based on problematic perceptions of
gender relations, represented by the concept of
“Romantic Love.”

12. Describe Chinese Footbinding

13. Dworkin
Derived from the Practice of Footbinding:
“Standards of beauty describe in
precise terms the relationship
that an individual will have to her
own body.”

14. Dworkin
“The pain [in the grooming process] teaches an
important lesson: no price is too great, no
process too repulsive, no operation too
painful for the woman who would be
beautiful. The tolerance of pain and the
romanticization of that tolerance begins
here, in preadolescence, in socialization, and
serves to prepare women for lives of child-
bearing, self-abnegation, and husband-
pleasing.”

15. Dworkin
Argument from Analogy:
Two things are similar in important
ways

16. Dworking
The Analogical Leap:
Most (perhaps all) present beauty
standards are problematic in the
same way as Chinese Footbinding

17. Name Current Beauty Practices

18. Dworkin
The Solution:
“A first step in the process of liberation
(women from their oppression, men
from the unfreedom of their
fetishism) is the radical redefining of
the relationship between women
and their bodies. “

19. Does Dworkin successfully prove her
conclusion:
Current beauty standards are wrong
because they are based on
problematic perceptions of gender
relations, represented by the concept
of “Romantic Love?”